We swapped our carpet for vinyl planks and EVERYTHING IS WONDERFUL.

When we moved into our house last year we tore out carpet, painted, redid the stairs, replaced 18 windows, and added a fence and started a garden. Everything ground to a halt when Penny arrived. Besides a new baby, what really stopped us was the fact that all of the rooms we now want to fix up are rooms that will eventually be completely remodeled in the far and distant future. We know we can’t undergo a whole remodel RIGHT NOW, but there are still things we want to change in the immediate future and it’s hard to justify spending money and time on something that’s just going to disappear.

the carpet when we moved in – it looked really nice but was doomed from the start

The carpet in the house is what broke me. It’s a cheap carpet that the previous owners put in brand new when they put their house on the market – and I don’t blame them for that. We appreciated the new carpet downstairs (upstairs was a different story), but it felt like furry plastic and keeping the dogs’ muddy paws off of it was an eternal battle that I was losing. One edge was fraying so that if you stepped on it with socks you might get a staple that was poking up from the floor in the bottom of your foot. And it smelled from the dogs rolling around on it.

Then one day in August one of our dogs puked up his whole breakfast on it, and just after I had shampooed that mess up as best I could, Penny crawled away from me while I was changing her diaper and peed on the carpet. So that was it. I texted Javi in manic desperation and we started pulling the carpet up the very next day.

To solve the problem of spending money on something that will eventually be replaced, we went with cheap floating vinyl planks. We decided to replace the carpet in our bonus room, the wood tiling the led from the bonus room to the entryway by our side door, and the truly horrific vinyl sheeting from the 90s that covered our kitchen floor. I actually hated our kitchen floor more than the carpet, so this was a really exciting project for me!

A lovely mess Penny made on our permanently stained kitchen floor – no matter how hard I scrubbed and bleached this floor, the stains were not coming out. Also, they showed every ounce of dirt the dogs tracked in. HATED IT.

We went to Lumber Liquidators for the materials, and they helped us pick the best floor option for price, self-installation, and for durability with kids and dogs. Vinyl was the best choice for us because it looks great and is **EASY TO CLEAN** which is really the number one criteria when you have dogs and young kids. The poor dogs – they loved that carpet and they hate how slippery the vinyl is. First world dog problems.

There was a shockingly ugly vinyl floor beneath the carpet in the bonus room that just boggles the mind when you think that once upon a time someone picked this floor for the room. It looks like a sad elementary school classroom floor from the 80s. We rolled up the carpet and padding and took it to the dumpster, and removed the edging around the room and the staple lines across the floor. After doing this in three rooms in our first Louisville house and the entire upstairs of this house, we are pros at carpet removal.

Then we set to work putting the underlayment down on top of the bad classroom vinyl. I helped Javi up to this point, but once you start putting the planks in it’s really a one-person job. He watched some youtube videos and figured out his own tricks for cutting special-sized pieces for corners and finishing touches. It’s a lot of work, but it’s doable and worth the effort if you want to save the money on installation.

Pulling the sheet vinyl up in the kitchen was a bit more difficult because it was glued down, but it was still a fairly quick job. We started this project so suddenly that we didn’t think about the fact that my mom and gma were coming to stay with us the following week! We also had plans for friends to come over on Saturday and our house was full of children playing in the bonus room, which at that point only had half the carpet pulled up. It was a hurricane.

The whole project took us about a week to finish, and now our house looks 100% better. It’s done a number on me mentally! I look forward to spending time in these rooms now instead of feeling disgusted by the floor and the constant nagging feeling of needing to shampoo and vacuum the carpet. Everything is so cohesive, and the flow of the floors makes the rooms feel bigger. We bought a rug for the bonus room and I found two chairs at the local St. Vincent de Paul thrift store – more on that in another post. I moved my desk into the kitchen alcove that we hadn’t been using, so now the bonus room is all for play! We want to continue sprucing our kitchen up a little bit with paint for the cabinets, a backsplash, and new countertops…and definitely new paint in both the kitchen and the bonus room. Projects for the future!